The pianist Van Cliburn died on Wednesday at 78, and it was hard not to think of him during the violinist Joshua Bell’s ravishing recital that evening at Alice Tully Hall.

This wasn’t just because Mr. Bell announced near the end of the concert that he and his accompanist, Sam Haywood, had the privilege of playing for Mr. Cliburn a few days before his death. Memories of Mr. Cliburn came to mind more because of what he represented and what passed with him: the mid-20th-century era when classical music was far more central to American cultural life.

Mr. Bell, born in 1967, is one of the final echoes of that period, one of the vanishingly few artists still able to sell out halls on their names alone. He is an old-fashioned performer in both his repertory and his restless, dramatic physical presence. Listening to him on Wednesday I wondered what heights of fame, record sales and talk-show appearances he might have scaled had he been born 30 or 40 years earlier.

Which is not to say that he has gone unnoticed. Mr. Bell has been well known for long enough that it is tempting to take him for granted.

But it would be a mistake to underrate him. In a program of Schubert, Strauss and Prokofiev sonatas, with morsels by Fauré, Sarasate and Tchaikovsky thrown in at the end, he proved once again that there is no better-sounding violinist. His tone is a wonder: rich and round from the top to the bottom of his range. The precision of his bow control allows for fine gradations of volume and touch.

While not always revelatory, Mr. Bell is always riveting. On Wednesday his account of Schubert’s Sonata in A minor was more propulsive than reflective, but irresistibly so. He was broadly lyrical in Strauss’s Sonata in E flat and alternately dazzling and sly in Prokofiev’s spiky Sonata in D.

Mr. Haywood was an unfailingly elegant partner, from the clarity of his Schubert to his sober chords at the start of the final movement of the Strauss. He and Mr. Bell combined poignantly in their final encore, the Mélodie from Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir d’un Lieu Cher,” the piece they performed for Mr. Cliburn in his final days.

It would be wrong to call it restrained. It was moving, rather, because it pulsed with the extroverted vitality that is Mr. Bell’s trademark. He will never get Mr. Cliburn’s ticker-tape parade or million-record annual sales, but he plays with the same exhilarating passion.